If this kind of stuff excites you as much as it excites me and you're in the Bay Area, get thee to the EFF Awards (or tune into the livestream) and watch us honor this year's winners: Just Futures Law, Erie Meyer, and the Software Freedom Law Center, India:

eff.org/deeplinks/2025/08/join…

So much of the activity that EFF defends involves *writing*. The web was written into existence, after all, both by the coders who hacked it together and the writers who filled it up.

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Join Your Fellow Digital Rights Supporters for the EFF Awards on September 10!

For over 35 years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has presented awards recognizing key leaders and organizations advancing innovation and championing digital rights.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

I've always wanted to be a writer, since I was six years old, and I'm so lucky to have grown up through an era is which the significance of the written word has continuously expanded.

I was equally lucky to have writing teachers who permanently, profoundly shaped my relationship with the written word.

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I've had many of those, but none were so foundational as Harriet Wolff, the longest-serving English teacher at Toronto's first alternative school, SEED School, whence I graduated after a mere seven years of instruction.

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Harriet was a big part of why I spent seven years getting a four year diploma. She was such a brilliant English teacher, and presided over such an excellent writing workshop, that I felt like I still had so much to learn from high school, even after I'd amassed enough credits to graduate, so I just *stuck around*.

Harriet died this summer:

obituaries.thestar.com/obituar…

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We hadn't spoken much over the past decade, though she did come to my wedding and was every bit as charming and wonderful as I'd remembered her. Despite not having spoken to her in many years, hardly a day went by without my thinking of her and the many lessons she imparted to me.

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Harriet took a very broad view of what could be good writing. Though she wasn't much of a sf fan, she always took my sf stories seriously - as seriously as she took the more "literary" fiction and poetry submitted by my peers. She kept a filing cabinet full of mimoeos and photocopies, each excellent examples of various forms of writing. Over the years, she handed me everything from Joan Didion essays to especially sharp op-eds from Time Magazine, along with *tons* of fiction.

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Harriet taught me how to criticize fiction, as a means of improving my understand of what *I* was doing with my writing, and as a way of exposing other writers to new ways of squeezing their big, numinous, irreducible feelings out of their fingertips and onto the page. She was the first person I called when I sold my first story, at 17, and I still remember standing on my parents' lawn, cordless phone in one hand and acceptance letter in the other, and basking in her approval.

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Harriet was a tough critiquer. Like many of the writers in her workshop, I had what you might call "glibness privilege" - a facility with words that I could use to paper over poor characterization or plotting. Whenever I'd do this, she'd fix me with her stare and say, "Cory, this is *merely clever.*" I have used that phrase countless times - both in relation to my own work and into the work of my students.

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Though Harriet was unsparing in her critiques, they never stung, because she always treated the writers in her workshop as her peers in a lifelong journey to improve our craft. She'd come out for cigarettes with us, and she came to every house party I invited her to, bringing a good, inexpensive bottle of wine and finding a sofa to sit on and discuss writing an literature.

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She invited me to Christmas dinner one year when I was alone for the holidays and introduced me to Yorkshire pudding, still one of my favorite dishes (though none has ever matched the pleasure of eating that first one from her oven).

Harriet apparently told her family that she didn't want a memorial, though from emails with her former students, I know that there might end up being *something* planned in Toronto.

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After all, memorials are for the living as much as for the dead. It's unlikely I'll be home for that one, but the best way to memorialize Harriet is in writing.

For Harriet, writing was a big, big church, and every kind of writing was worth serious attention. I always thought of the web as a very Wolffian innovation, because it exposed so many kinds of audiences to so many kinds of writers. There's Kate Wagner's acerbic Zillow annotations, of course, but also so much more.

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One of the web writers I've followed since the start is Kevin Kelly, who went from *The Whole Earth Review* to serving as *Wired*'s first executive editor. Over the years, Kevin has blazed new trails for those of us who write in public, publishing many seminal pieces online.

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But Kevin was and is a *print* guy, who has blazed new trails in self-publishing, producing books that are both brilliant *and* beautifully wrought artifacts, like his giant, three-volume set of photos of "Vanishing Asia":

vanishing.asia/the-making-of-v…

This week, Kelly published one of his famous soup-to-nuts guides to a subject: "Everything I Know about Self-Publishing":

kk.org/thetechnium/everything-…

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Everything I Know about Self-Publishing

This essay is also available on my Substack. Subscribe here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/ In my professional life, I’ve had several bestselling books published by New York publishers, as well as many other titles that sold modestly.

^{The Technium}

t's a long, thoughtful, and *very practical* guide that's full of advice on everything from printing to promo. I've self-published several volumes, and I learned a *lot*.

One very important writer who's trying something new this summer - to wonderful effect - is Hilary J Allen, a business law professor at American University. During the first cryptocurrency bubble, Allen wrote some of the sharpest critiques of fintech, dubbing it "Shadow Banking 2.0":

pluralistic.net/2022/03/02/sha…

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Allen also coined the term "driverless finance," a devastatingly apt description of the crypto bro's desire for a financial system with no governance, which she expounded upon in a critical book:

driverlessfinancebook.com/

This summer, Allen has serialized "FinTech Dystopia," which she called "A summer beach read about Silicon Valley ruining things." Chapter 9 dropped this week, "Let’s Get Skeptical":

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/c…

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It's a tremendous read, and while it mostly concerns itself with summarizing her arguments against the claims of fintech boosters, there's an absolutely jaw-dropped section on Neom, the doomed Saudi megaproject to build a massive "linear city" in the desert:

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> More than 21,000 workers (primarily from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal) are reported to have died working on NEOM and related projects in Saudi Arabia since 2017, with more than 20,000 indigenous people reported to have been forcibly displaced to make room for the development.

Allen offers these statistics as part of her critique of the "Abundance agenda," which focuses on overregulation as the main impediment to a better world.

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Like Allen, I'm not afraid to criticize *bad* regulation, but also like Allen, I'm keenly aware of the terrible harms that arise out of a totally unregulated system.

The same goes for technology, of course. There's plenty of ways to use technology that is harmful, wasteful and/or cruel, but that isn't a brief *against technology itself* There are many ways that technology has been used (and can be used) to make things better.

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One of the pioneers of technology for good is Jim Fruchterman, founder of the venerable tech nonprofit Benetech, for which he was awarded a Macarthur "Genius" award. Fruchterman has just published his first book, with MIT Press, in which he sums up a lifetime's experience in finding ways to improve the world with technology. Appropriately enough, it's called *Technology For Good*:

mitpress.mit.edu/9780262050975…

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Book Details - MIT Press

MIT Press - Book Details

^{The MIT Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology}

After all, technology is so marvelously flexible that there's always a countertechnology, for every abusive tech. Every 10-foot digital wall implies an 11-foot digital ladder. Last month, I wrote about Echelon, a company that makes digitally connected exercise bikes, who had pushed a mandatory update to their customers' bikes that took away functionality they got for free and sold it back to them in inferior form:

pluralistic.net/2025/07/26/man…

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Repair hero Louis Rossman - who is running a new, direct action right to repair group named Fulu - offered a $20,000 bounty to anyone who could crack the firmware on an Echelon bike and create a disenshittified software stack that restored the original functionality:

youtube.com/watch?v=2zayHD4kfc…

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In short order, app engineer Ricky Witherspoon, cracked it, and had a way to continue to use SyncSpin, his popular app for Echelon bikes, which was shut out by Echelon's enshittification. However, as Witherspoon told 404 Media's Jason Koebler, he won't release his code, not even for a $20,000 bounty, because doing so would make him liable to a *$500,000* fine, *and* a five-year prison sentence, under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

404media.co/developer-unlocks-…

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404 Media

2025-08-27 20:22:43

Developer Unlocks Newly Enshittified Echelon Exercise Bikes But Can't Legally Release His Software

An app developer has jailbroken Echelon exercise bikes to restore functionality that the company put behind a paywall last month, but copyright laws prevent him from being allowed to legally release it.

Last month, Peloton competitor Echelon pushed a firmware update to its exercise equipment that forces its machines to connect to the company’s servers in order to work properly. Echelon was popular in part because it was possible to connect Echelon bikes, treadmills, and rowing machines to free or cheap third-party apps and collect information like pedaling power, distance traveled, and other basic functionality that one might want from a piece of exercise equipment. With the new firmware update, the machines work only with constant internet access and getting anything beyond extremely basic functionality requires an Echelon subscription, which can cost hundreds of dollars a year.

In the immediate aftermath of this decision, right to repair advocate and popular YouTuber Louis Rossmann announced a $20,000 bounty through his new organization, the Fulu Foundation, to anyone who was able to jailbreak and unlock Echelon equipment: “I’m tired of this shit,” Rossmann said in a video announcing the bounty. “Fulu Foundation is going to offer a bounty of $20,000 to the first person who repairs this issue. And I call this a repair because I believe that the firmware update that they pushed out breaks your bike.”
youtube.com/embed/2zayHD4kfcA?…
App engineer Ricky Witherspoon, who makes an app called SyncSpin that used to work with Echelon bikes, told 404 Media that he successfully restored offline functionality to Echelon equipment and won the Fulu Foundation bounty. But he and the foundation said that he cannot open source or release it because doing so would run afoul of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the wide-ranging copyright law that in part governs reverse engineering. There are various exemptions to Section 1201, but most of them allow for jailbreaks like the one Witherspoon developed to only be used for personal use.

“It’s like picking a lock, and it’s a lock that I own in my own house. I bought this bike, it was unlocked when I bought it, why can’t I distribute this to people who don’t have the technical expertise I do?” Witherspoon told 404 Media. “It would be one thing if they sold the bike with this limitation up front, but that’s not the case. They reached into my house and forced this update on me without users knowing. It’s just really unfortunate.”

Kevin O’Reilly, who works with Rossmann on the Fulu Foundation and is a longtime right to repair advocate, told 404 Media that the foundation has paid out Witherspoon’s bounty.

“A lot of people chose Echelon’s ecosystem because they didn’t want to be locked into using Echelon’s app. There was this third-party ecosystem. That was their draw to the bike in the first place,” O’Reilly said. “But now, if the manufacturer can come in and push a firmware update that requires you to pay for subscription features that you used to have on a device you bought in the first place, well, you don’t really own it.”

“I think this is part of the broader trend of enshittification, right?,” O’Reilly added. “Consumers are feeling this across the board, whether it’s devices we bought or apps we use—it’s clear that what we thought we were getting is not continuing to be provided to us.”

Witherspoon says that, basically, Echelon added an authentication layer to its products, where the piece of exercise equipment checks to make sure that it is online and connected to Echelon’s servers before it begins to send information from the equipment to an app over Bluetooth. “There’s this precondition where the bike offers an authentication challenge before it will stream those values. It is like a true digital lock,” he said. “Once you give the bike the key, it works like it used to. I had to insert this [authentication layer] into the code of my app, and now it works.”

Witherspoon has now essentially restored functionality that he used to have to his own bike, which he said he bought in the first place because of its ability to work offline and its ability to connect to third-party apps. But others will only be able to do it if they design similar software, or if they never update the bike’s firmware. Witherspoon said that he made the old version of his SyncSpin app free and has plastered it with a warning urging people to not open the official Echelon app, because it will update the firmware on their equipment and will break functionality. Roberto Viola, the developer of a popular third-party exercise app called QZ, wrote extensively about how Echelon has broken his popular app: “Without warning, Echelon pushed a firmware update. It didn’t just upgrade features—it locked down the entire device. From now on, bikes, treadmills, and rowers must connect to Echelon’s servers just to boot,” he wrote. “No internet? No workout. Even basic offline usage is impossible. If Echelon ever shuts down its servers (it happens!), your expensive bike becomes just metal. If you care about device freedom, offline workouts, or open compatibility: Avoid all firmware updates. Disable automatic updates. Stay alert.”

Witherspoon told me that he is willing to talk to other developers about how he did this, but that he is not willing to release the jailbreak on his own: “I don’t feel like going down a legal rabbit hole, so for now it’s just about spreading awareness that this is possible, and that there’s another example of egregious behavior from a company like this […] if one day releasing this was made legal, I would absolutely open source this. I can legally talk about how I did this to a certain degree, and if someone else wants to do this, they can open source it if they want to.”

Echelon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

How I Built QZ—and How Echelon Is Now Breaking It - Roberto Viola

By Roberto Viola, creator of QZ On September 10, 2020, I began building QZ (qdomyos-zwift), an app born from a simple idea: open up closed fitness hardware and make it work with the platforms people actually love—Zwift, Peloton, Kinomap, and more.

^{cagnulein (Roberto Viola)}

Fulu paid Witherspoon anyway (they're good eggs). Witherspoon told Koebler:

> For now it’s just about spreading awareness that this is possible, and that there’s another example of egregious behavior from a company like this […] if one day releasing this was made legal, I would absolutely open source this. I can legally talk about how I did this to a certain degree, and if someone else wants to do this, they can open source it if they want to.

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Free/open source software is a powerful tonic against enshittification, and it has the alchemical property of transforming the products of bad companies into *good* utilities that everyone benefits from.

One example of this is Whisper, an open source audio transcription model released by Openai. Since Whisper's release, free software hackers have made steady - even remarkable - improvements to it.

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I discovered Whisper this summer, when I couldn't locate a quote I'd heard on a podcast that I wanted to reference in a column. I installed Whisper on my laptop and fed it the last 30+ hours of podcasts I'd listened to. An hour later, it had fully transcribed all of them, with timecode, and had put so little load on my laptop that the fan didn't even turn on. I was able to search all that text, locate the quote, and use the timecode to find the clip and check the transcription.

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Whisper has turned extremely accurate transcription into a utility, something that can just be added to any program or operating system for free. I think this is going to be quietly revolutionary, bringing full-text search and captioning to audio and video as something we can just take for granted.

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That's already happening! FFMpeg is the gold-standard free software tool for converting, encoding and re-encoding video, and now the latest version integrates Whisper, allowing FFMpeg to subtitle your videos on the fly:

theregister.com/2025/08/28/ffm…

Whisper is an example of the "residue" that will be left behind when the AI bubble pops. All bubbles pop, after all, but not all bubbles leave behind a useful residue.

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Whisper it: FFmpeg 8 can now subtitle your videos on the fly

: Media multitool taps Vulkan for GPU encoding, adds VVC support, and dusts off some ancient formats

^{Liam Proven (The Register)}

When crypto dies, its residue will be a few programmers who've developed secure coding habits in Rust, but besides that, all that will be left behind is terrible Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs:

pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bub…

But the free/open source code generated by stupid and/or evil projects often lives on long after those projects are forgotten. And lots (most) of free/open code is written for *good* purposes.

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